Free Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport

unhurried and dignified manner and his concern about the Tsarevich’s health, that he too was a doctor. This afternoon, 4 July, he again asked about the swelling in Alexey’s leg. Nicholas was impressed; to his mind, ‘the dark gentleman’, as he referred to Yurovsky before he discovered his name, appeared solicitous for the family’s welfare. Perhaps the new commandant would be more accommodating about the request made that day by Dr Botkin that a priest be sent in to say mass on the coming Sunday.
    Neither Nicholas nor Alexandra appear to have inferred anything sinister from this sudden turnaround other than a necessary security measure, nor could they have known the true measure of the man now in control of their lives. Yakov Yurovsky had been born a Jew. His father, a glazier, had been sent into exile to the Jewish settlement at Kainsk in Novosibirsk province in Siberia for theft; there the youngYurovsky studied at the local Talmudic school. Yurovsky would later observe with bitter cynicism that thanks to the Tsar, he had been born ‘in prison’. Some said he was the grandson of a Polish rabbi, but in any event his family appear to have distanced themselves from their Jewish roots after moving to Tomsk, and Yurovsky himself ‘converted’ to Lutheranism in the early 1900s, perhaps necessary acts to escape religious persecution.
    Years of poverty, hunger and deprivation, as one of 10 children, had sown the seeds of profound social resentment and led him to be virulently anti-monarchist. He remembered the smell of growing up in a cramped apartment above the butcher’s shop in Tomsk. As a child, he had shared the same naïve belief as others in the Tsar’s infallible goodness. ‘I thought then one could go to the Tsar and tell him how hard our life was’, he remarked. But disillusion rapidly set in as Yurovsky developed a political and social consciousness. Soon the Tsar in whom he trusted was, in his impressionable young imagination, a ‘fiend’ a ‘bloodsucker’ and a killer. Yurovsky escaped the stultifying environment of Tomsk as soon as he could, having trained as a watchmaker, but not before serving time in jail around 1898 for an unspecified murder. He settled in Ekaterinburg where he worked in a jeweller’s shop, married in 1904 and joined the Bolshevik party in 1905. Soon after that his political activities forced him to leave Russia and he lived for several years in Berlin, where he worked as a watchmaker and also trained as a photographer. Returning to Russia in 1912, Yurovsky and his family (he had three children) lived for a while in Baku in the Caucasus, at that time a hotbed of revolutionary activity under the leadership of a young Joseph Stalin, before returning first to Tomsk and then to Ekaterinburg. Here he set up a photographer’s studio with Nikolay Vvedensky at number 42 Pokrovsky Prospekt, next door to the city’s noisy market; it is said the premises were also a front for covert meetings of local Bolsheviks. Business boomed for Yurovsky when he started offering the new ‘electrophotographs’ which could be processed and ready in ten minutes, and he was soon co-opted into taking the official photographs of prisoners in the local jail. He and his family lived in an apartment in the centre, with a dacha at Shartash, on the outskirts of the city. But then war intervened and he was drafted into the Russian army in 1915. Because he had been suffering from rheumatism and tuberculosis, he was allowed to train as a medical orderly, thus avoiding being sent to the Front. When the Revolution came in 1917, he deserted and went home to Ekaterinburg, where he had continued to run his photographic business whilst becoming increasingly involved in local politics.
    Yurovsky was by now a totally dedicated Communist and had quicklyrisen from soldier deputy on the local Ekaterinburg Soviet to executive member of the Ural Regional Soviet. As a member too of the local Ekaterinburg Cheka, he operated as